


Blot Out the Stars

by snowshus



Category: Super Powereds - Drew Hayes
Genre: Bad Parenting, Gen, Minor Character Death, the first powereds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-15
Updated: 2019-03-15
Packaged: 2019-11-18 12:10:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18120569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snowshus/pseuds/snowshus
Summary: Heroes do what is necessary to save the most amount of lives.





	Blot Out the Stars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gehayi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gehayi/gifts).



Graham DeSoto’s first child is born with stars in her eyes, quite literally. Rose’s eyes are black all through with small bright points of light that form her iris. The light begins to leak out of her when she is seven, a low constant glow all around her. They work everyday on controlling it, on bringing the light in and holding it inside where no one can see it but it never seems to work. She just glows and glows, every year getting brighter and brighter until Graham cannot look at her without sunglasses, by the time she is sixteen even those aren’t enough. 

Across the country a darkness spreads, fueled by the words “just try harder.”

The first incident of Powered destruction in the public record is Susanne Beem. In the following decades graduate students would comb through the public archives to assign powered and super explanations to a variety of incidents dating back to the beginnings of history, but that will always be a little bit speculation. The Susanne Beem incident is where the name Powered will first be written, though it will not be right away. 

She is twelve years old and her concussive blasts levels a block of suburban houses, fifteen people die and thirty more are injured in the initial pulse. There are twenty more pulses before the threat is eliminated. She wouldn’t stop. She refused to control her power. It’s all there in the report, corroborated by witnesses, many of whose testimony are far harsher than Graham’s barebones recording of the facts as he saw them. They watched the incident from a distance. They did not have to see her tear streaked face or hear her begging him for help. 

Graham gets home and his eyes automatically go to Rose’s room and the ever-present white light that seeps through the cracks in the blinds. He almost leaves again. How can he go home to his family after this? He feels sick, his stomach twists and turns and he finds himself dry heaving in the daisies. He hasn’t done that in ages, hasn’t been bothered by the things he has had to do since his first taste of what real war was. 

What he did that day would have been unacceptable even in war. 

Similar incidents pop up everywhere. The perpetrators are mostly young, though not always - the oldest incident of this pre-division era is a man of forty-five. According to towns people afterwards, he’d been a bit of hermit - living out in the country alone most of his life only coming to town every few months to buy supplies and never staying long. On the day of the incident he’d been shopping for a hammer and walked too close to a electric sander demonstration. He’d drained the entire region’s power supply in less then a second and let it explode out of him the next. He’d killed himself by the time Captain Starlight could get there. His body still crackled with electricity for hours afterwards.

Graham responded to incident after incident-all different powers, all different levels of destruction, all claiming they can’t stop it, they can’t control it. 

Heroes do what is necessary to save the most amount of lives. 

Graham is feeling less and less like the hero he was trying to create when he began this thing. His daughter never leaves the house except dressed in layers and layers of the thickest black cloth they can find and even with the protections her light still manages to leak out through the stitching. She reads Jane Eyre alone in her room for the seventh time by Graham’s count. He wonders if she sees herself in the character of the wife, kept locked out of sight in the attic, while her perfectly ordinary, mundanely human baby brother gets to have everything she is denied. He wonders if that makes him Rochester, keeping her hidden along with his inability to do anything to fix her. He always hated Rochester. 

It is Graham’s job to speak for the Super community. It’s the responsibility he took when he decided to come forward, to show the world what was real - to show all the children hiding who they are that they were not alone. This was not how it was supposed to go. His people are dying and he doesn’t know the words to make it stop.

There is a fine line between believing in people and believing people. There is a fine line between pushing someone to reach their potential and banging uselessly against their limits. Rose says she cannot control the light, it’s time Graham believed her. It’s time to stop forcing a solution that isn’t working. Light leaks through the stitching of Rose’s layers but it is enough of a shield that it doesn’t burn his eyes to look at her. She cannot control the light but the light can be controlled. 

That is the heart of what he brings to the meeting with the small sub-committee that will eventually grow into the DVA. If these people, these empowered people cannot control their powers then it up to Graham, and the heroes, and this sub-committee to figure out how their powers can be controlled. They need to find a way of reaching these people and removing them from the situation, before they hurt more people - before they get hurt. 

The change is slow at first. Heroes are too few, stretched too thin to always send the most effective one. The early years it’s mostly just finding a way to transport the Powered person to a bunker where they can be monitored without getting killed in the process. They get more sophisticated as the list of power types grows, as they become more familiar with how they work, as quick thinking and ingenuity gives way to experience and understanding. 

Then comes the first nullifier. She isn’t a hero, she would never have made it through the rigorous training. She would never have passed a simple police academy personality screening. They use her anyways. How can they not? She changes everything. The success rate for the Heroes was getting better, they had to resort to the lethal option less and less but it was still imperfect, it was still not good enough. With her there is never a need to take the lethal option. 

Her fees are outrageous and Graham is happy to pay out to The Company, as she calls her little team of teleporters. Slowly they hand more and more power over to her, and her company of unheroic solutions grows beyond the scope of transporting a few out of controlled Powered into an empire of shadowy business. It should be concerning but the number of unnecessary deaths drops dramatically, and they are so good at what they do. Graham lets it happen. He will eventually live to regret that, but it won’t be for many years. Even if he could somehow know so many years before hand what they would eventually become involved in he’s not sure he would change anything. They are not a good solution but for now they are the best solution, they will have to do.


End file.
